Recently, on a full moon night, a dashboard gauge appeared in my dream and made a plea which I have tried to put it back using my paint utility. The gauge was certainly sad and this post is to highlight the gauge emotions, nothing personal
Lot of Visualization Experts, (to name some, Stephen Few, Jon Peltier , Charley Kyd ) despise the fancy Dials and Gauges.
Their main argument is
“Gauges waste valuable screen real-estate”
But the alternative they suggest is usually “Black and white” and “bullet graphs” all around the places. Not questioning if it is useful or not, but definitely boring and distasteful!
If you were running a retail store or a coffee shop, you would atleast want an aesthetically pleasant appearance and less of “clutter”, right?
Then why choose to clutter-your-Dashboard ?
IMHO, A dashboard is an application, very similar to any website or the ERP or CRM package that you probably using on a day to day basis. Why would you choose to not make it beautiful, atleast for selling the concept to your upper management?
So Where do Gauges really help?
I stumbled across this article about Visual Merchandising for Business Intelligence.
Visual merchandising, primarily and most notably a retail term, is the art of optimising the presentation of a product or service in order to stimulate sales.
A retailer is looking to create a welcoming and comfortable environment for customers by stimulating consumer senses through a variety of mechanisms at its disposal. The benefits are increased foot-fall, positive word-of-mouth promotion, and a returning customer base which all contribute towards improved sales and profitability over an extended term.
This same principle can be applied to dashboards and reporting to assure the success of a business intelligence (BI) implementation. Dashboards and reports are the shop-window and the sales floor into the BI solution as a whole.
Gauges definitely help sell the concept of dashboards to upper management and they definitely help Dashboard vendors sell their products. So the bottom line is, even though you may have best visual representation alternatives, Gauges are here to stay. There is no point fighting it.
One suggestion to the experts is to keep doing what you do and let the vendors incorporate Gauges and bullet graphs as part of their toolset. The user needs to get educated through your blogs about the best visualization methods and let them choose how they will be more productive and derive better intelligence about their operations.
What is your take on Gauges? Do you love to hate them or Do you love to keep them?
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5 Comments
Very funny! I like the term visual merchandising for BI
You have oversimplified the problems with dials and the like.
They do use up an inordinate amount of area for such small amounts of data. But that is not the major problem.
More important is that they only show one point in time. A line chart can show a complete time series, so you not only know the curent value, but you can see which way it is trending (and a stupid up or down arrow is merely more colorful noise).
For example, your dial that shows 263 dashboards on an apparently arbitrary scale of 0 to 500, would be more interesting as a line chart showing the accumulation of dashboards over time. We could see the drop over Thanksgiving and the larger drop over the eyar-end holidays. We could see how the slowdown over the summer accelerates through the fall. But one single value doesn’t tell me anything besides the one single value, except perhaps that 250 is the cutoff between fair (yellow) and good (green).
I don’t think you can apply that visual merchandising quote to dashboards and gauges. Are we trying to improve sales and profitability? Sure, but we’re not trying to increase sales of the graphic we choose to use. We’re not trying to merchandise the dashboard or its constituent charts. We’re trying to use the graphic to convey enough meaningful information that the managers can make knowledgeable decisions which will improve the sales and profitability of the business.
Calling dials and gauges a valuable or even necessary part of the BI toolset is doing the concept of effective BI a great disservice.
Jon,
Visual Merchandising was used in the context of selling the concept of dashboards for efficient reporting of metrics.
I understand conveying enough meaninful information but sometimes you just need pretty stuff to begin with
Here is a follow up comment at Meta brown http://powerpivotpro.com/2010/01/04/more-discussion-on-gauges/
”
Context is everything. Every automobile dashboard has a few gauges similar to your example, and nobody has ever complained to me that this was gimmicky. Factories and power plants still have plenty of dial gauges in use. I wouldn’t use these constantly, but they have their merits. Gauges are familiar, and fairly close to a linear representation. If they are used in a straightforward way, gauges can be very clear graphic representations of data.
“
Found this conversation at idashboards blog
Trip Dixon says:
January 7, 2010 at 11:50 am
It all comes down to the audience. I’ve worked with companies that want their dashboards to look like the cockpit of a fighter jet, others that essentially create line item reports within their dashboards. In either case, they loved their dashboards. At least the target audience did, which is the goal.
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